Destroyer Angel: An Anna Pigeon Novel (Anna Pigeon Mysteries) Read online

  “Are these things any better roasted?” Katie asked. She was holding up one of the mushrooms Leah had picked earlier in the day. Raised north of Duluth, Minnesota, the only child of two mothers, both of whom were concerned with natural foods and sustained harvests, Leah had grown up hunting mushrooms and gathering wild rice.

  Before Leah could respond, Katie had jabbed the orange fungus with a stick and poked it into the flame more as if she were torturing than cooking it.

  “Don’t do that,” Leah said softly. Katie kept doing it. Leah looked away.

  “Leave a few, at least,” Heath said. Lobster mushrooms had added a nice zest to the prepared foods they’d brought.

  “Never eat a mushroom I haven’t okayed,” Leah said. “Some are deadly.”

  “Oh right, like I’m going to mistake an Amanita for a lobster,” Katie sneered.

  “They look like deer mushrooms, not lobster,” Leah said mildly.

  “Do you see Anna?” Heath asked Elizabeth, a sharp silhouette on the bluff overlooking the water.

  “Nope. Nada.”

  Feeling abandoned, Heath swallowed a slug of bourbon. It definitely tasted better from a tin cup than from a crystal glass. She wondered if that would be true inside four walls. Definitely a double-blind test in the offing when they returned to Boulder.

  A crashing in the woods interrupted Heath’s meditation. Katie dropped the mushroom she was burning with such determination.

  “Wolf?” Elizabeth asked hopefully. “It would be so cool to see a wolf.”

  “More likely a bear or a moose,” Heath said. “Get Wily’s leash, would you, E?”

  Elizabeth ducked into the tent with the enviable ease of the young and limber, scooped up the leash, then knelt, legs folding smoothly like the self-lubricating hinges on Leah’s high-tech inventions, and clipped the lead to Wily’s collar.

  “Probably a deer,” Leah said absently.

  Too many years without predators had allowed the deer herds to outgrow their habitat. In winter, they starved and died of disease. Wherever humans were known to give handouts, they begged. Without food, even Bambi could become aggressive. Wolves had reinhabited northern Minnesota, but not in sufficient numbers to do the thinning work.

  Wily’s neck hair stiffened under Heath’s hand. His body went rigid. A growl, so low she more felt than heard it, began building in his chest.

  “It’s people,” she said quietly.

  THREE

  All forms of sorrow and delight, All solemn Voices of the Night. The words seemed to form from the soughing of the wind in the dying leaves. The mystical ululation of a loon, a sound that seemed to Anna to linger on the water long after the bird had ceased to call, punctuated the thought.

  Wadsworth? Frost?

  The air was a delicate balance. The last of summer rested on the skin as the prickle of coming winter brushed the mind. Anna could taste the fertile loamy scent of leaves, fallen and readying to return to the earth, and the lingering smell of warm grass, dust, and pine. Mated with the spicy scent of campfire smoke, it triggered a longing for sometime, someplace, someone that never existed, but was nonetheless exquisite, and to be deliciously mourned.

  Enjoying nostalgia, a luxury she seldom allowed herself, she lay back in the stern of the canoe as it drifted down the Fox River as light and quiet as a leaf on a pond. A new moon, a dime-sized wraith barely edged with light, was almost lost in a dense sea of glittering stars. This far north, this far from neon, fluorescent, incandescent, and halogen, this far from television screens, stars and sky appeared simultaneously close and impossibly distant. If Anna let her fingers loose from where they relaxed around the gunwales, she might fall up and forever.

  There was nowhere she needed to be, no one she needed to serve. The owner of the convenience store at the put-in said the camp they’d planned on using had been burned over by a forest fire, so they stopped a few miles upstream. Anna reveled in the extra time to do absolutely nothing productive. She knew she should be missing Paul. A better husband than Paul Davidson would only serve to make a woman feel chronically inadequate.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy his company; they’d been married several years and she was still crazy in love with the man. Catching his smile in a crowd never failed to make her heart skip a beat. The thing was, when she was alone in wild country—or as wild as country got in these United States—Anna didn’t miss anyone, not her friends, not her dog or cat, not her sister, Molly, not her husband.

  Early imprinting, she supposed. In her thirties she’d been pretty well deconstructed by life. In solitude and wilderness she’d been put back together. Perhaps it wasn’t so odd that she felt at home here, complete.

  Paul was different. He moved through the world of people with the ease of a water snake across a calm lake. Human constellations, in the form of neighborhoods, clubs, or congregations, came to his orbit, drawn by his warmth and honor.

  Anna admired it greatly but couldn’t live that way every day. Now and then, she needed to breathe air that wasn’t someone else’s exhalation. Even this trip was somewhat overcrowded for her taste, though Leah seemed nice enough for an extremely wealthy person. Money was like sugar; too much of it sickened people.

  Leah didn’t talk much, which was a plus, and her voice was so soft. It had been the first to fade as Anna drifted farther and farther from camp. Heath’s went next, and E’s. High and sharp, Katie’s was the last to be nullified by the gentle susurration of the river.

  In blessed solitude and silence, Anna drifted. Heaven. To dream of anything else was sacrilege—if one believed in sacrilege.

  Gods were tricky business. Anna seldom gave them a thought, nor, if they existed, did she expect they pondered much upon her comings and goings. This amiable standoff ended when Paul retired as sheriff of Adams County and moved to Colorado, where she was a district ranger at Rocky Mountain.

  Before he was a sheriff, Paul had been an Episcopal priest. He was an Episcopal priest again, working interim at St. Aidan’s in Boulder. Tired of pursuing the bad guys, he said he needed to pursue the good guys for a while, for the sake of his soul. Father Davidson was not the sort to press his wife to attend church or to embrace Jesus. That would have sent Anna screaming for the hills.

  Paul Davidson enjoyed the simple gift of faith.

  When Anna asked him in what way and why, he said people needed to believe in something. Not necessarily the patriarchal smiting god, or the white-washed westernized vision of the carpenter’s son, not even in miracles. In the twenty-first century miracles were commonplace. People couldn’t get excited over a man walking on water when they’d seen a man walking on the moon. Paul’s contention was that to fend off despair and embrace life, humanity needed to move beyond miracles. They needed to believe the impossible: that there was an end to suffering, that their emptiness would be filled. That they were loved.

  Since the beginning, churches had used all that was deemed holy to get their victims to collude in their own destruction. Regardless, churches were where people sought the divine. So Paul served his grand scheme of love from the altar.

  Trailing her hand in water grown cold with early rains in Canada, Anna wondered idly what she served.

  A low thrumming clatter of grouse wings applauded.

  A sign, she thought. She smiled.

  The applause continued, the sweet cacophony punctuated by the grouse clicking low in his throat. Then something alien, a wrong note in the symphony of the woods, metal swallowing metal. Anna sat up straight, suddenly alert. Nothing in nature made a sound like that.

  Faintly, far away, and unmistakably, a pistol had been manually cocked, a wheel gun probably, a big one, .45 or .357. Maybe a .38. Because she was on vacation—and flying commercially—Anna hadn’t brought a weapon. Heath had no interest in firearms.

  Whoever it was had not come from downstream. Anna would have heard them snap-crackle-and popping through the downed leaves and twigs.

  Hunters? Possible. It might
be deer season. Outside of the parks, Anna was unsure of the rules and regulations. As far as she was concerned, hunting season was when rangers hunted poachers.

  A chance encounter? A lone and twisted individual happening on helpless-looking women while pursuing a moose? Opportunistic cruelty of the kind portrayed in the movie Deliverance?

  “Squeal like a pig” sliced out of Anna’s memory.

  Thieves? Thieves would be nice. Thieves liked to take things and slip peacefully away. Property crimes were common in parks and forests. Cars were clouted and pockets picked, but seldom this far from civilization. Hikers carried little of value, but for their gear, and gear wasn’t easily converted to cash.

  There was little hope for a nice honest robbery. Unfortunately other forms of lowlifes—denizens of horror films and fever dreams—often chose to be paid in the currency of screams, investing fear into the depleted accounts of their sorry, miserable, stinking lives.

  Anna turned the canoe’s nose upstream and began paddling hard against the current.

  FOUR

  In a public campground, a KOA—any place where people gathered—the approach of human footsteps would not have been frightening. Alone, in the backwoods at nightfall, there was no reason for pedestrian traffic. No good reason.

  A man, dressed like a lumberjack in a red-and-black plaid coat and black jeans tucked into new boots, materialized out of the charcoal gray of evening beneath the trees. A gun that looked the size of a small cannon, the hole in the barrel as wide and deep as a well, was held close by his thigh. Admittedly, Heath’s eye level was less than three feet off the ground; still, he was huge. He had to be close to six-six. Beneath the layers of flannel and wool, his body was thick. Like the blade of a shovel, his jaw was wide at the top and came to a spade point below a small mouth. Dark hair formed a widow’s peak on a low, broad forehead. In some lights the face would appear ruggedly handsome. In others, dimorphic and hideous, the top half that of a he-man, the bottom that of a woman.

  “Good evening,” Heath said, hanging on to the vain hope these were hunters and this an unexpected social call. “What can we do for you?”

  “Hendricks, Leah,” the man said in a flat cool voice, his eyes flickering over Heath and dismissing her.

  “I’m Leah Hendricks,” Leah whispered. Her face, always pale, was gray where blood had fled the skin, and orange where the glow of the fire hit her cheekbones and the ridge of her nose. The effect was disturbing, feverish.

  “Hendricks, Katie,” said the man.

  “What is this? Is Gerald okay?” Leah asked. Gerald was her husband.

  “Hendricks, Katie,” the man repeated.

  “Is something the matter with Daddy?” Katie asked. “Are you a cop?”

  His eyes, just holes in his face from where Heath sat, sparked as they moved in Katie’s direction. “Yes,” he said. “Katie Hendricks?”

  “Here,” Katie said and raised her hand as if she were in school.

  “Aunt Gwen?” Heath asked in the barest scrape of time, when she could believe that the police had sent forest rangers with bad news.

  “This is it,” the man said in a louder tone.

  “About fucking time,” came another male voice. Seconds later a smaller, bearded man, dressed almost identically, stepped into the ring of firelight. He carried a rifle.

  “You’re not the police, are you?” Heath asked. Two more men emerged from the dark fringe of trees, one with a handgun. Overkill, Heath thought and wished she hadn’t. The men spread out, making four points of a box around Heath and the others.

  “Are you lost?” Heath inquired politely, trying to force the situation to normalcy. “About all we can offer you is a cup of coffee.”

  “You and you.” The tall black-haired man, the leader most likely, indicated Katie and Leah with the barrel of the pistol. Katie’s eyes grew so big she looked more like a lemur than a human child. “There. Sit.” He pointed at the feet of a black man who, in a black hoodie and black sweats, formed a shadow against the trees.

  “Sean’s got the ties, Dude,” the black man said. Sean was the fourth man, the last to enter the clearing. He looked like an extra from the road show of Grease who hadn’t aged well. He saw Heath staring at him and smiled with small, crooked, very white teeth.

  Terror stampeded over Heath. It was happening, the worst-case scenario; she was crippled and helpless and monsters had come for the children and she couldn’t do one damn thing to stop them. Not one goddamn thing. Visions of Elizabeth bleeding, clothing ripped, men in the midst of gang rape burned through Heath’s mind too fast for the eye to see, but not for the soul to feel.

  “Stay close, stay close,” she whispered, reaching out to clutch Elizabeth’s leg. Heath had to hold herself together. If nothing else, she could witness, she could memorize the faces. Sean, that was one name. She could listen for more so they could be tracked down. Heath’s eyes tried to catch detail, find meaningful marks, but flickering light and pounding pulse and the enormity of the size of horror of the men of the guns cracked her vision into a kaleidoscope of images.

  A story Anna once told flashed in her mind. A man in a bunny suit, shooting blanks from a revolver in one hand and waving a carrot in the other, charged into a Crime Scene Investigation class. He hopped around the room and out the door. When the students’ eyewitness accounts were read aloud, they did not agree on whether the shooter was black or white, male or female, if it was a rabbit or a kangaroo, or how many shots were fired. The only thing on which they agreed was that the intruder had guns in both hands.

  The point: Eyewitnesses were unreliable.

  There would be no eyewitnesses left after these men had done whatever they’d come to do. That reality struck Heath with the force of a two-by-four across the back of the head.

  “Run!” she hissed at Elizabeth and surged to her feet to put her body between the guns and her daughter’s flight path. She flopped from the camp chair like a landed trout. Her mind had forgotten her legs no longer worked.

  The gang leader, the tall man, straightened his arm, the pistol extending from his huge hand like a black finger pointing at Elizabeth’s midsection.

  “Nobody move,” he said in a tone as hard as cast iron. Elizabeth, Heath, the rustle of the leaves overhead seemed to freeze. Time took a breath. The black guy froze. The bearded man with the rifle was still as stone. Everything but the fire stopped moving. A silence, closer to deafness than quiet, swallowed the camp. Heath was afraid she was going to start laughing or crying or screaming.

  Over the water slow applause mocked the scene. The clapping grew louder, faster. A disapproving tongue clicking crept into the clatter.

  The black man jumped. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded as the noise faded.

  “Keep your pants dry, Reg,” the bearded man said. “Probably just an old rat or a squirrel messing around.”

  “I never heard no rat sound like that,” Reg said.

  “It’s a grouse,” Elizabeth told them. “They drum this time of year.”

  Heath scowled at her. Seen and not heard echoed in her head. Invisible and gone would be better.

  Reg looked at Elizabeth as if he were trying to figure out who she was calling a grouse, him or the creature that made the eerie sound.

  “Finish securing the Hendrickses. Get this one, too,” the leader said, his gun still aimed at Elizabeth. “Soon as it’s light, we go. Reg, cover them with the Walther. Sean, secure them.”

  The black man, Reg, had the “Walther,” a pewter-colored handgun. It was a kind of gun that shot more than six bullets. That was the extent of Heath’s expertise with firearms. Reg held it like a man who knew how to use it.

  Sean pulled an unopened package of plastic cable ties from the pocket of his jacket.

  Beneath Heath’s hand, Wily was trembling. Or maybe she was trembling; she couldn’t tell where she ended and the dog began, where reality ended and nightmare began.

  Ties in hand, Sean said, “Put your pretty
little wrists together so nice Uncle Sean can make sure you don’t get into trouble.”

  Leah held out her hands, wrists together.

  Wily began to bark wildly.

  “Shut the dog up,” the big man said to Heath. “You, with the others.” He laid a heavy hand on E’s shoulder. Elizabeth stumbled, then fell to her hands and knees.

  Leash trailing like the tail of a comet, Wily shot from under Heath’s fingers as if he’d been born in the Alaskan wilderness and just laid eyes on his first reindeer calf. Growl became roar, and his slink a lunge, as he went for the throat of the man who’d dared lay hands on a member of his pack.

  Wily’s heart was that of a young wolf; his bones were those of an old dog. The man swatted him down as if he were a mosquito, then kicked him hard in the side. Wily’s limp form flew through the air. With a crack of bone that snapped Heath’s heart in two, he slammed into the bole of a tree.

  FIVE

  Wily’s body slid down the trunk and pooled around the bottom as lifeless as a dropped towel.

  “You miserable son of a bitch,” Heath said, unable to comprehend such meaningless evil. From the corner of her eye, she saw Elizabeth rising to her feet on a tide of fury.

  “Stop!” Heath cried. “No! No!”

  Like an avenging angel, Elizabeth flew at the man. Pistol in hand, the man’s enormous red-and-black-clad arm rose.

  “Don’t shoot!” Heath screamed.